Serving them up to you as fast as I can, dear and beloved readers.
"Paris hires sheep to mow city lawns" by Thomas Adamson | Associated Press, April 06, 2013
PARIS — Paris City Hall this week installed a small flock of sheep to mow the lawn at the city’s gardens, replacing gas-guzzling mowers. Four ewes — shipped in from an island off the Brittany coast — are munching the grass surrounding Paris Archives building....
Last year, two goats mowed the lawn at Tuileries, the city’s grand 17th-century gardens. A similar experiment outside Paris found that sheep droppings brought swallows back to the area. ‘‘It might sound funny, but animal lawnmowers are ecological as no gasoline is required, and cost half the price of a machine,’’ said Marcel Collet, Paris farm director. ‘‘And they’re so cute.’’
Just watch where you step.
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They make a nice sound, anyway.
Also see: May Day: Globe Sticks It to China
Just don't call it lamb:
"Meat fraud highlights food fears in China" by Chris Buckley | New York Times, May 04, 2013
HONG KONG — Even for China’s scandal-numbed diners, news that the lamb simmering in the pot may actually be rat took the country’s endless outrages about food hazards into a new realm of disgust.
Well, there is that old "joke" about cat substituting for chicken, but this....
My view here is it's all bad now. If you aren't raising or growing it yourself you can't really trusts it. Health food organic is better, but who can trust anything anymore?
In an announcement intended to show that the government is serious about improving food safety, the Ministry of Public Security said over the Internet on Thursday that police had caught traders in eastern China who bought rat, fox, and mink flesh and sold it as mutton. But that and other cases of meat smuggling, faking, and adulteration that were also featured in Chinese newspapers and websites Friday were unlikely to instill confidence in consumers already queasy over many reports about meat, fruit, and vegetables laden with disease, toxins, banned dyes, and preservatives.
Gee, the Chinese government is behaving just like mine.
Sixty-three people were arrested and are accused of “buying fox, mink, and rat and other meat products that had not undergone inspection,” which they doused in gelatin, red pigment, and nitrates and sold as mutton in Shanghai and adjacent Jiangsu province for about $1.6 million, according to the ministry’s statement. The account did not explain how exactly the traders acquired the rats and other creatures.
No wonder you are hungry again an hour later.
“How many rats does it take to put together a sheep?” said one typically baffled and angry user of Sina Weibo,China’s Twitter-like microblog service that often acts as a forum for public venting. “Is it cheaper to raise rats than sheep? Or does it just not feel right unless you’re making fakes?”
Also known as a CIA platform in my mind.
The arrests were part of a nationwide operation since late January to “attack food safety crimes and defend the safety of the dining table,” the ministry said. Police arrested 904 people suspected of selling fake, diseased, toxic, or adulterated meat, and broke up 1,721 illicit factories, workshops, and shops. Yet the ministry acknowledged that diners still had reason to worry.
Is it enough to make you vegan?
In food safety campaigns in past years “some serious problems have been dealt with swiftly and vigorously, but for a variety of reasons, food safety crimes remain serious, and are displaying new circumstances and features,” an unnamed senior official said in the statement.
At least no one is going hungry in AmeriKa, right?
“For example, there is selling of meat injected with water and meat from animals dead from disease, as well as passing off relatively cheap types of meat as relatively expensive beef and mutton.”
Globe won an award for the same thing with the fish around here.
China’s prime minister since March, Li Keqiang, has said that improving food safety was a priority — one of the main grievances of ordinary citizens that he has said his government would tackle.
They always say that, but the issue blows over and fades from the headlines. Just as a Bangladeshi.
But similar vows by his predecessor, Wen Jiabao, ran up against inadequate resources, buck-passing, and muddle among rival agencies, and protectionism by local officials, said Mao Shoulong, a professor of public policy at Renmin University in Beijing, in an interview.
Sound familiar, America?
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Woah, spit that out!
And with the implication of cannibalism the other day, do you REALLY KNOW what is that MEAT?
I really don't feel like lunch right now.
